Woody Hayday

Back to it I thought I would write a quick post about something which seems to be helping my ebay partner network revenues – that is campaign splitting. I am totally unsure of how ebay partner network campaign splitting will work for you – I am only just starting to test it my self – but from the first week it appears to be helping my largest site overall.

If you are an EPN (Ebay Partner Network) affiliate you will be familiar with their latest scheme which has been in play since Nov 09 or similar – the idea of a quality based click through deal whereby the higher the quality of traffic you send through to them the higher they pay you per click. The hybrid system encapsulating the benefits of PPC while associating to a finer level with quality seems to be working well on the whole but does change the game slightly.

The set-up before the move to EPC was clear – a campaign and its sub id’s (channels, custom id’s) were there to allow the publisher a clearer view on what was working – a means to allow them to refine their sites and provide a better quality through to ebay which returned more sales and which ultimately benefited both parties. This would mean traditionally a campaign per website and sub-id’s (channels) for each sub category, sub page, sub item or whatever would sufficiently track transactions and allow for later refinement, later. However with the adoption of EPC the campaign gained a new association in the relationship.

As it stands EPC is calculated per campaign (as I understand it) which means if we lazily coast on with the bigger sites all pummelling single campaigns our EPC is far from efficient. Say a site is getting 3000 clicks through to ebay a day, its set up as a single campaign with about 20 sections underneath it all using custom id’s so as you can track transactions later. Overall the campaign gets a measly 0.01 – 0.04 EPC per day depending on the moon or whatever. This 0.01-0.04 EPC is paid out for all 3000 clicks. Great. But if a single sub page is responsible for 1000 of those click through’s and is producing a 0.00 or a 0.01p EPC (performing badly) then potentially it pulls down the epc value of the other 2000 clicks.

In efforts to pull one of my larger sites from the low EPC it currently resides at I have now split it from being a single campaign with custom id’s to being nearly 20 campaigns titled “site – subcampaign x” – effectively making campaigns of the major customid’s. This does make the nice epn reports messier to look at but its all for the sake of refinement. If everything is averaged before calculating epc this should not really affect all that much, however based on the first week or so it seems to offer two clear advantages. Firstly its making me more money. The split up site is averaging a higher EPC overall and higher returns. Spreading it across multiple campaigns seems to distinguish the better from the worse allowing a higher overall average epc value per click. Secondly in terms of finding the poor performers from the group it couldn’t be simpler. No more digging around in transaction logs that really were built to allow refinement under the old system – you can see the epc’ of each area of a big site strait from the management reports – it allows you to identify the 1p-epc area’s of your site and axe them or improve them.

I am sure ebay will dilligently continue to improve their toolset for the epn, especially as I am sure they don’t want millions of campaigns created like this (lol), but in the meantime splitting your larger breadwinning campaigns may be a worthy pursuit – I shall repost in a month or so with some progress.

Probably not worth doing on your Auction 2 post sites this one! haha!